Thursday, 31 December 2009

Well, it's the last finally the day of the year. So, here's wishing you all a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year.

It's been a pretty eventful one in the Unknown Household - we had one son pass away from cancer, and had another one join the family. So, I can pretty much guarantee that 2010 will be less eventful for us than 2009 (at least I hope so).

We finished out the old year yesterday by taking the Unknown Daughter up to Boston to see the Science Museum's Harry Potter Exhibit. Total Cost:

Luckily, our two nieces were home from college., They drove down the night before to baby-sit Wonder Boy for the day, so we got to go without munchkin in tow. But Boston traffic still sucked - it took us 45 minuted to go about 3 miles on Rte 93 (and this was not even rush hour traffic). Ah well, that's the price of being in a city.

Remember - there will be a lot of alcohol-impaired folks out there tonight, so be safe, and see you next year. Being old fogeys with a couple of young kids, we'll be home, warm, and in bed by 10 or so.Yeah, we're boring. But I'm O.K. with that - I'm in touch with my inner old fogey.

Thursday, 24 December 2009

Since Unknown University starts (and ends) their fall semester a bit late, I'm just putting the finishing touches on my grades - two classes down and one (the smallest, luckily) to go.

It's been a tough semester - three preps (for the non academics among you, a prep is a unique class - so three preps means I taught three different classes), and one was a brand new one (Fixed Income) for me. I took it because the senior faculty who regularly teaches it took a sabbatical, and it's required of all our students. The new prep took far more time than I'd thought, so I didn't get as much research done as I'd hoped.

The winter break will be dedicated first to getting two papers completed and submitted to journals. I let things slide a bit these last few years due to the Unknown Son's illness, so I'm glad to be finally working on things that have the potential to go to decent journals - these two will likely be sent to Financial Management and Journal of Banking and Finance (two very solid journals). As for the other things I'm working on, one should go to to a solid accounting journal (JAAF), another to Journal of Futures or Journal of Derivatives, and another will be targeted to the Financial Analyst's Journal. I'm also working on a piece with a PhD student that will hopefully be finished in time to submit to the FMA annual meetings.

Somewhere in there, I'll also make some minor changes to my class (it's the same class I taught for the first time this past semester, so it's in pretty good shape). It shouldn't take more than a day or two to make the changes, since I prepped pretty thoroughly for it last time.

It's an ambitious schedule, but three of the pieces use the same data set, and a fourth is mostly done. With a bit of hard work, I should have a very productive Winter break. So, to all of my coauthors who read the blog: take heart - things will be done soon enough.

On a more somber note, please keep Mark Bertus and his family in your prayers. He's a fairly young faculty member at Auburn, with several young children. He's in the final stages of colon cancer, and is a remarkable guy. He'll leave an amazing legacy of memories to those of us who've had the privilege of knowing him. You can read the blog his wife has been maintaining to keep everyone informed about the illness here.

Mark's journey reminds me of something Steve Brown (a radio preacher) once said. It's something to the extent of "Whenever a pagan gets cancer, God allows a Christian to get cancerso that the world will see the difference in how Christians deal with it." Depending on your beliefs, that might or might not sit all that well with you. But as you read his blog, you'll see that it definitely applies here.

To all who're reading this - Have a Merry Christmas (or whatever holiday you choose to celebrate).

Sunday, 20 December 2009

I love living in the NorthEast - it's where I grew up, and there's just something about real winter that feels right. But I can do without 3-foot snowdifts in my driveway. Luckily I have neighbors with plows and snowblowers.

The Unknown Daughter was at a friend's house for a birthday party/sleepover. No school for her tomorrow, so we get to see if we can get the neighborhoods to build a huge snowman.

Thursday, 17 December 2009

In a previous post I described the theoretical implausibility as well as the empirical rarity of governments inflating away their debt. I concluded that a deficit-driven buyer’s strike was unlikely, by itself, to pop the bond bubble.

Does this mean that “deficits don’t matter”? Oh no, quite the contrary. Deficits do matter, but it’s important to understand the mechanism. Deficits don’t operate via a buyer’s strike unless you go into hyperinflation. Instead the channel is monetary policy.

The Treasury issues bonds. The Fed buys them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just an internal transfer. The external effect is not bond supply; the bonds never hit the street. Instead, the external effect is government expenditure. Essentially the Treasury is spending dollars that have been newly printed by the Fed.

In the short run this policy will boost private sector consumption and employment, as indeed it is designed to do. But in the long run it will lead to inflation; seigniorage always does.

Note that this inflation will not necessarily manifest itself in the form of rising interest rates, at least not immediately. If the Fed is willing to buy 75% of each Treasury auction (matching China at its peak) then sure, bond yields will stay low.

But the increase in money supply has to be reflected somewhere. Two obvious candidates are the dollar and real assets. Sure enough, in the last year or so these two instruments have fallen and risen, respectively. Policymakers who look only at bond yields to determine inflation pressures are missing the point.

Ultimately of course rates will have to go up. If something cannot last forever, it will not.

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

I'm still in the thick of exams week (one to give today, one Friday, and one Saturday), and they're not all written yet. But this piece from Burton Malkiel in FT.com was worth highlighting. The best part was the last paragraph:

As de facto market makers, high-frequency traders can exploit pricing anomalies and pick up pennies at the expense of other traders. Such activities are not sinister. The paradox of the efficient market hypothesis is that the people whose trades help make the market efficient must be compensated for their efforts. As former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt has written: “We should not set a speed limit to slow everyone down to the pace set by those unwilling or unable to compete.” High-frequency trading networks let large and small investors enjoy a more efficient and less costly trading environment.

Sunday, 13 December 2009

Paul Samuelson (the first American Nobel Laureate in Economics, and arguably the most influential economist of the 20th century) died today at home at age 94. He was largely responsible for the transformation of economics from a largely descriptive and discursive discipline to a highly mathematical and rigorous one.

He was responsible for turning MIT into a world-class economics center - over the years, he played a role in bringing in Solow, Engle, Klein, Krugman, Modigliani, Merton, and Stiglitz.

In addition, he wrote perhaps the single most popular and widely used economics text in history - "Economics", published in 1948. I read it in my undergraduate years in the late 1970s, and it was still selling 50,000 copies a year in the late 1980s.

Sunday, 6 December 2009

I need to focus on research for the next couple of months, so blogging will likely be much less frequent for a while. I'm not closing down, but I am scaling back - probably only a post a week or so. In the meanwhile, here's a picture of the Billboard for Anders Bookstore, which is just at the edge of the Auburn campus. Smart marketing.

For any students reading - good luck with finals - if you're at Auburn, consider a longer rental term. For all the faculty - good luck writing (and grading) them and wrapping up the semester.

Thursday, 3 December 2009

Believing or disbelieving in the bond bubble seems to have become a political choice, at least in the United States. I can’t recall such a degree of partisan frenzy in the debate over previous bubbles such as housing, tech stocks or commodities. And for good reason: any discussion of bond prices and interest rates leads inevitably to a discussion of budget deficits and Fed/Treasury policy, which – unlike say dotcom valuations – is ideologically fraught territory.

Sure enough, and with dreary predictability, commentators from left and right have divided along partisan lines in their analysis of the deficits. Here’s conservative historian Niall Ferguson:

There is no end in sight to the borrowing binge. Unless entitlements are cut or taxes are raised, there will never be another balanced budget. By 2039, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, the federal debt held by the public will have reached 91 percent of GDP, according to the CBO’s extended baseline projections....Of course, our friends in Beijing could ride to the rescue by increasing their already vast holdings of U.S. government debt ... [But] the Chinese keep grumbling that they have far too many Treasuries already.

Right now, however, the bond market seems notably unworried by deficits. Long-term interest rates are low; inflation expectations are contained (too well contained, actually, since higher expected inflation would be helpful) ... This is truly amazing. It’s one thing to be intimidated by bond market vigilantes. It’s another to be intimidated by the fear that bond market vigilantes might show up one of these days, even though you’re currently able to sell long-term bonds at an interest rate of less than 3.5%.

Both Ferguson and Krugman seem to think that the danger is that of a “buyers’ strike” in the bond market. Both Ferguson and Krugman are wrong.

The way a buyers’ strike works is this: bond investors fear that huge deficits could lead to inflation down the road as the government tries to print its way out of debt. Hence they demand higher interest rates (lower bond prices) today to compensate for this risk.

Ferguson fears that a buyers’ strike could easily happen in the near future, and hence deficits are something to worry about. Krugman inverts this line of reasoning: he argues that low interest rates are prima facie evidence that a buyers’ strike is unlikely, and so deficits are nothing to worry about1.

They both miss the point. The notion of a buyers’ strike caused by fears of deficit-driven inflation is conceptually flawed, for the simple reason that the government cannot inflate away its debt.

It’s all a question of loan duration. Sure, if the entire government debt were in the form of a single loan of very long duration, with no payments before the maturity date of the loan, then yes, the government could foster inflation / debase the currency over the lifetime of the loan, and thus gyp the lenders.

But in actual fact, the majority of the US government’s debt is in the form of short duration loans – bonds with 2 years or less to maturity. This debt has to be rolled over. If lenders suspect that the government is planning to inflate the currency, then at the time of rollover they will demand higher nominal interest rates on the rolled debt, to compensate for this expected inflation. They will also demand higher real interest rates, to compensate for the additional uncertainty. And so the cost of servicing the debt will actually increase, by an amount greater than the amount of inflation. It’s like running on a treadmill: the government cannot get ahead2.

The facts bear this out. Here’s a chart from UBS showing that changes in government debt / GDP are broadly uncorrelated with the level of inflation.

Note the strong element of feedback (a favorite topic on this blog) at work here. The possibility of a buyers’ strike in the future implies that inflation cannot work as a strategy for debt-reduction; the futility of an inflationary strategy suggests that a buyers strike will not occur in the present. A buyers’ strike is thus a self-negating prophecy; the present (no-strike) equilibrium is maintained; and market yields have nothing to do with the probability of such a strike occurring.

But wait. Does this mean that deficits don’t matter? Not quite. I’ll return to this question in my next post.

Footnotes

#1Their respective stances would be more credible if it weren’t for the fact that six years ago, Krugman and Ferguson were on the opposite sides of the deficit debate. Back then, Krugman was a vocal deficit hawk, raising the prospect that tax cuts, entitlement commitments and military spending could ‘drive interest rates sky-high’. Meanwhile, Ferguson claimed that deficits were necessary and desirable if that was what it took to maintain the level of military spending required for purposes of US hegemony.

Of course both sides claim to have switched allegiance for the best of reasons. But the cynic in me will perhaps be forgiven for concluding that whether one is a deficit hawk or not depends greatly on what type of spending the deficit is being used to finance.

#2As a general principle, the only way a government can inflate its way out of debt is to print money so fast that the real value of the debt falls significantly before the debt comes due. For a short-duration debt portfolio (like that of the US), this means hyperinflation.